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Presently a narrow opening revealed itself in the shore about a quarter of a mile away, among the trees which clustered close to the water's edge; and Carera, directing my attention to it, informed me that was the channel.
Could it be that Carera desired to give me a friendly hint to prepare for the worst?... Or was it possible that the ghostly man would bring me a further message and help me in some way to escape? At any rate, it was a more encouraging theory than the other, and I resolved to act on it. If the priest did me no good, he could, at least, do me no harm.
In this horrible interchange of filthy banter the pirates appeared to have forgotten, for the time being, the object of their trip off to the felucca, but at length one of them exclaimed, with a profusion of oaths, that Carera had secured an unfair advantage of them during the afternoon's bartering transactions, and that they had come off to demand a cask of rum with which to square the account Carera, on his part, tried to laugh off the whole affair as an excellent joke, and proposed to mix them a tub of grog there and then as an appropriate finish to it; but this would by no means satisfy the ruffians, who were firm in their demands.
We now had a fine rattling breeze, which we expected would carry us across the bay and out through the Barcos Channel within the next hour, but, to Courtenay's and my own inexpressible chagrin, Carera now informed us that, in order to escape the possibility of a second rencontre with the frigate we had fallen in with on our passage up, he had determined to go to the westward, returning round Cape San Antonio instead of by way of Cape Maysi.
And it was the key to the navigation of these lagoons and their approaches which Carera had undertaken to sell to the Spanish authorities in consideration of his receiving, as the price of his treachery, one-half the amount of the captured spoil.
And here Carera was within an ace of making a mess of the whole business; for whilst we had been tumbling about becalmed a current had got hold of us and had set us so close in with the land that whilst rounding the point we actually passed through the breakers beating on the reef; and I am convinced that had we been a couple of fathoms further to leeward the hooker would have laid her bones there.
"You must pardon me, Lieutenant; but as the proverb hath it, strange countries, strange manners; my friend here, Padre Carera, brings a message from El Senor Picador Cangrejo, one of our magnates, that he will consider it an especial favour if you will can on him, either this forenoon or tomorrow."
I asked Carera whether he was never afraid that some of these free-and-easy gentlemen might some time or another take it into their heads to overhaul the Pinta, on the chance of her happening to have on board something worth taking; to which he replied, with a laugh, that he had no fear whatever of any such thing; the pirates always respected such traders as happened to be engaged in dealing with any of the fraternity, these traders having a means of making their characters known to any suspicious- looking craft which might happen to manifest a too curious interest in their movements.
Carera further informed us that, by a lucky combination of circumstances, he had not only discovered the locality of but had actually been permitted to enter the pirates' treasure-house a cellar hollowed out of the earth beneath Giuseppe's dwelling and that there was a considerably larger accumulation of treasure in it than even he had imagined; and that, further, there was no time to be lost in organising the expedition against the pirates, as it had transpired that many of them were growing anxious to enjoy the fruit of their nefarious labours, and serious thoughts were entertained of a speedy general division of the spoil and dispersion of the gang.
Padre Carera this time moved away to the other side from beneath the hole, but still within two feet of it in fact, he could not get in this direction farther for the altar piece and being still half asleep, he lay back once more against the wall to finish his nap, taking the precaution, however, to clap on his long shovel hat, shaped like a small canoe, crosswise, with the peaks standing out from each side of his head, in place of wearing it fore and aft, as usual.
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